Solution

Design and production of workflows to automate processes on the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud platform using VMware vRO

Support implementation of requirements to in-house self-service portal to vRO

Designed automated processes to allow commissioning and decommissioning of environments

Result

Reduced provisioning time

Efficient infrastructure deployment

Reduced risk

Improved productivity

The Customer

As one of the world’s largest financial institutions, this organisation offers retail, wholesale and private banking along with leasing and real estate services to over 8m clients worldwide.

The Customer

As one of the world’s largest financial institutions, this organisation offers retail, wholesale and private banking along with leasing and real estate services to over 8m clients worldwide.

The situation

This organisation has a number of internal customers requiring the use of bare-metal servers and storage, along with needs for vSphere environments. Commissioning of these services was a manual and time consuming process spread across a number of teams. A solution was needed to centralise and automate these processes.

The manual processes for provisioning and decommissioning infrastructure and customer facing services included:

The creation and removal of storage volumes from both ESXi hosts and bare metal servers

The deployment of VMware vSphere® clusters and individual ESXi hosts

The deployment of VMware Site Recovery ManagerTM replicated datastores

The process was also prone to errors and inefficiencies as users were unable to provision their own services. Any solution deployed had to operate on the customer’s HEC (Hitachi Enterprise Cloud) platform and had to work hand-in-hand with their in-house built customer facing selfservice service portal.

Our approach

Working with the customer and key stakeholders we led Xtravirt Automation Accelerator workshops to understand key requirements, business processes and deployment methods and provided guidance on how these could be successfully automated.

Workflows were then designed and produced to automate the required processes on the HEC platform using VMware vRealize® OrchestratorTM (vRO). We also supported the implementation of automated processes to update the in-house self-service portal with task information.

The customer also wanted to increase the efficiency of build infrastructure; we designed automated processes to allow commissioning of environments for specific projects and decommissioning to bare-metal servers upon project completion to allow for re-use.

Outcomes achieved

Reduced provisioning time – the time to provision new services and get new users onto IT systems has been reduced from days to hours.

Efficient infrastructure deployment – the multi-step manual process to commission servers can now be achieved in a matter of minutes with the click of a button. Reduced risk – automated processes remove the probability of user error.

Improved productivity – commissioning of environments for special projects can be done more quickly and easily through automated processes and can also be decommissioned to bare-metal and used again.

At a glance

Challenge

Provisioning and decommissioning of infrastructure and customer facing services were an inefficient, manual, time-consuming process

Users were unable to provision their own services and the process was prone to errors

Any solution had to be compatible with the customer’s Hitachi cloud platform and work with the in-house self-service portal